1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to the managing of identity and style information.
2. Description of Related Art
The rapid expansion of the Internet and networking technologies has considerably reduced communications costs. However, this reduced cost has come at the expense of increased complexity in the design and maintenance of networked computer systems and networked applications. These costs have increased the total cost of ownership for many of these networked applications.
In response, many application service providers have attempted to reduce costs by maintaining the networked computer systems and applications necessary to support business functions, such as payment processing, invoicing, digital rights management, and content delivery, such as streaming audio and video. The application service provider develops expertise in providing access to the particular business functions and delivers access over a communication network such as the Internet.
For example, a referring web site requiring credit card authorization or debit card processing services may out-source that function to a payment processor application service provider. The payment processor maintains the service connections to the bank networks, clearing houses, American Express® and Visa®. The payment processor may use a secure protocol, such as https or the like. When a user of the web site selects the web site payment page, the request is referred to a secured web server, maintained by the payment processor for entry of the credit card information. In this way, the user's sensitive credit card information is not stored on the referring web site, security is increased and costs are lowered.
However, when the user of the web site is referred to the out-sourced page, the identity of the referring site is compromised. The user of the web site may experience problems since the out-sourced page may not support the same navigation functions as the referring site.
In response, many application service providers allow clients to specify certain format characteristics of the out-sourced page in an attempt to increase the perceived integration of the out-sourced page with the referring web site. For example, using custom programming techniques, a referring web site may specify the text colors used in the out-sourced page. This provides some degree of integration with the referring client site.
Some application service providers attempt to address these integration problems by requiring the user to design the page or content portion to be viewed. These application service providers merely provide information which the referring web site uses to build an appropriate page. This has the disadvantage in that the application service provider's expertise is not being fully exploited. For example, a payment processor may have already solved the problem of how to capture non-U.S. address information by initiating each transaction by first identifying the country information. An individual web site may not be aware of this problem until it cannot capture non-US address information.